Saturday, October 12, 2013

INDIA FOOTLOCK CONTEMPLATES PARALLEL LIVES

this is the latest complete India Footlock tale. i have been hesitant to put it here b/c the 2 friends who read it didn't get it, so it may just be weird. but i haven't posted here much lately, so i thought i'd see if anyone else got it, liked it, hated it, or whatever

‘Speaking of such things,’ Gloria remarked one afternoon,
when we had not in fact been speaking of such things at all, and hadn’t been
for several weeks [she had, like all of us, picked up India’s habit of non
sequiter, which consisted of suddenly hearkening back to a conversation from
weeks or month ago], ‘what do people think of the notion that each of our lives
exists simultaneously on several different planes that don’t know about each
other?Like a kaleidoscope where
each possible combination of stones already exists when we see the one that
seems to come up alone?”

India nodded.’ So that each possible thing that might happen
to you in a given instant actually is
happening in its own realm.’

Uh-huh,’ Gloria nodded.‘Only it’s much more complicated than that, because most
things that happen to you happen between you others—like the eight of us
sitting here. And so that each possibility that could exist for every one of us
exists on planes that are both individual and collective.Like, reimer here has dozens of
possibilities, but in some of them he’s with us, and others not. and each of us
too has dozens of possibilities, some of which include the others.’’

‘well, in at least one of these possibilities, I’m getting
dizzy,’ muttered Joel.

‘she’s quite right, you know,’India said firmly. "The possibilities
are endless, and quite intriguing.And when you think further than in some of our other-planes, we are different
ages or races or temperament, because each possibility for each person carries
a separate history.For instance,’
she turned to me, I assume because I was sitting next to her. ‘On one plane,
you and I could be young lovers, gently touching each other for the first time.’

I gulped, and joel snickered. much as we all loved India,
her place in our hearts was as a more genteel and subversive version of Auntie
Mame, not as a hot young woman.And yet, even as I thought
this, a vision shimmered through a scrim of not-quite-fantasy, and there was a
young, thin, fragile india, dressed in an opaque negligee, her arms around my
neck and her small, firm breasts pressing into my chest, as I trembled in my
first, awkward caress, while outside, india’s voice continued in its usual neutrally cheery tone.‘’of course, we could as
easily be a pair of hungry rats tearing each other to pieces over a scraggly
bit of some long-rotting animal corpse.’’

‘eieuw,’ said Gloria, and joel laughed: ‘india, I never knew
you were a romantic!’ the others, myself among them, rushed to change the
subject.Yet the feeling that
remained with me the rest of the day was neither of our lightly but caringly
bonded group nor the ghoulish brutality of the starving rats.It was a slight and contented erotic
tenderness to a girl I’d never seen but somehow had known well, and I wondered
what was happening between those lovers who might have been india and me and
who I knew I’d never see again.